Pros
When the management cycle shifts every couple of years you might get a group that understands the sales process and what it requires. When this happens the outside sales jobs for Rain Bird are an excellant job. They allow you to treat your territory like an independant business. You can run programs and make deals. The contractors, distributors and specifiers are a great bunch of people and a joy to work with. They are a well grounded group. There is also the joy of just watching a sprinkler work. During the good times the new products they bring out are interesting to work with.
Cons
The Senior Management has completely lost touch with who the customers are we are selling to. This has happened for several reasons. One of the reasons is that Senior Management does not listen to its field sales force about what is happening in the market place. Although they go through a regular cycle of changes at the highest levels of management, it is not clear if the owner is truly making these decisions or if Senior Management makes decisions based on what they think the owner will say. Either way the decisons being made are very short sighted in scope and more often than not are making the customers who actually send checks to Rain Bird very unhappy. If the decisons are actually being made by the levels of management below the owner, with the approval of the owner, then they are not giving him the entire truthful picture. One of the other problems is the hiring proceedures employed at Rain Bird. They are under the MBA illusion of hiring. Current policies require that they hire people who are "Over Qualified" for the position being hired for. This is in large part responsible for the high turnover rate particularlly in the field positions. They attract candidates with the promise that they will move up quickly as they prove themselves. They hire people with "pedigrees" for positions that are better served with a lower level of education. The contractor customer base does not connect with these type of people or their sales tactics. In 18 to 24 months the former CEO or National Sales Manager has grown tired of getting muddy and dirty with no prospects for promotion and they leave. The customers are constantly having to retrain a new salesmen and eventually they just give up on Rain Bird. Our competitors salesmen stay in a territory for many years and typically are from the industry. Most contractors don't care how these hotshot sales guys used to sell widgets in his old company. They want to know will he get dirty with them and which end the water comes out of the sprinkler!